+ORACLE-BASE.com Tim hall came up with a brilliant idea to appreciate OTN for all the ways it helped shape the Oracle Community. I have to say thati whole heartedly agree and here is my contribution for #ThanksOTN.

Recovery Appliance or RA or ZDLRA is something I've been very passionate about since its release and thus this very biased post on RA. Recovery Appliance is Database Backup and Recovery on Steroids . The ability to do (more...)

“REDO_TRANSPORT_USER” was an Oracle Database Parameter that was introduced in Oracle release 11.1 to help transporting redo from a primary to a standby by using a user designated for log transport , The default configuration assumes the user “SYS” is performing the transport. This distinction is very important since the user “SYS” is available on every Oracle database and as such most data guard environment when created with default settings are created with “SYS” (more...)

The Oracle Database Cloud Service allows for backup of an Oracle Database to the Oracle Cloud using Rman. Enterprise Manager 13c provides a very easy way to configure Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service. This post will walk you thru setup of the Oracle Database Backup Cloud service as well as running backups from EM.

There is a new menu Item to configure the Database Backup Cloud Service (DBCS) in the Backup & Recovery Drop down.

Oracle released Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance in 2014. The Recovery Appliance was designed to ensure efficient and consistent Oracle Database Backups with a very key focus on Recovery. I am going to write a series of blogs starting with this one to discuss the fundamental architecture of the Recovery Appliance and discuss the business case as well as deployment and operational strategies around the Recovery Appliance.So Lets start with why an Appliance. Oracle (more...)

I was recently asked to help a customer set up File Monitoring in Enterprise Manager and I thought since I haven’t blogged in a while, this could be a good way to start back up again..

Enterprise manager 12c provides a very nice Compliance and File Monitoring Framwork. There are many Built in Frameworks include for PCI DSS and STIG but this How-to will only focus on a custom file monitoring framework.

The Chicago Oracle Users Group (COUG) is finally in its reboot mode. Thanks to Alfredo Abate for taking on the responsibility and bringing the enthusiasm to bring the community back together. Jeremy Schneider has blogged about this here . There is a Linked in Group now open for business and i would recommend every one to contribute and lets make this reboot a success.

Collaborate 14 is coming soon and i can tell you that it is an excellent content learning and networking opportunity. I have been going to collaborate for a while and have found it to be not only a place to learn but also to network with my peers . We built the team to write the Practical Oracle Database Appliance which is available here at Collaborate 13 and were able to deliver a book with authors (more...)

I just realized that i have not blogged in a very long time. This has been partly because i switched jobs and started working for Oracle. it has been an interesting six months and i have been enjoying the challenge of working with various customer and helping them solve problems.The other thing that has been an important milestone in my career is the publishing of a book that collaborated with a very fine (more...)

Enterprise Manager 12c Already allows for deploying one-off patches thru the provisioning and patching module but what if you need to deploy a lot of agents and don't want to keep patching them after the fact. EM 12.1.0.3 has a new feature that allows for keeping management (more...)

Oracle Just Published a Document ID 1558550.1 that talks about an issues that i've had an SR out for 6 months now.Due to a Linux iostat bug BUG: 1672511 (unpublished) - oda - disk device sdau1 & sdau2 are 100% busy due to avgqu-sz valueThis forces host (more...)

An Oracle Exadata Full Rack consists of 8 DB compute nodes. Oracle has shifted the strategy to patching the exadata in 11.2.3.2.0 onwards to using Yum as the method of patching. the Quarterly Full Stack does not include the DB Compute nodes patches anymore. So that (more...)

Oracle Database Appliance Software version 2.6 is now available for Download. ODA 2.6 is the first version that contains combined software for ODA V1 and ODA X3-2.
This release also has an offline configuration Tool that will work with Virtualized and Non Virtualized ODA Configurations. This provides a lot of (more...)

I just uploaded my presentation on Oracle Database Appliance - RAC In a box some strings attached. Thank you for all the people that attended and i hope i was able to convey my points about the Database Appliance in a manner that was objective and factual

Collaborate 2013 is right around the corner and that is the place to be this April in Denver.
There are a lot of Learning and a lot of social Activities. I'm goign to be down there presenting an Paper on Oracle Database Appliance http://bit.ly/YFmPpu .
I will be talking about (more...)

Rman is an interesting tool and it seems everyday you learn something new. As part of a production issue we lost a diskgroup . This Diskgroup was only a small subset of the actual data but due to an issue in the underlying disk (External Redundancy). The database crashed. As we (more...)

Oracle Enterprise defaults to a timeout of 45 minutes . Depending on the organization or security policies you might want to change that to a lesser amount of time or in my case a longer period .
To check what the timeout is set

So I finally got the opportunity to deploy ODA 2.5 on a development Oracle Database Appliance. The Documentation is very lacking and needs more refinement for the masses.
Here are the steps to deploy ODA 2.4 by reimaging the ODA . Concepts and procedures for bare maetaling the box (more...)

So the cats out of the bag and Oracle has finally announced that Jan 31st ODA 2.5 will be available.
The ODA 2.5 is a pretty significant update to the ODA Platform.
it will have
1. Virtualization as an option with OVM 3.1.1
2. Official External (more...)